Overview

Once you open the Post tab and open the Post Article, Post Photo or Post Review page, the Article Content section on the left panel includes five key areas that require you to enter the information that will appear on your blog main page.

Note: Before you can access this area on the Post Review page, you first must upload a photo.

This is the area where you enter a title for your blog. The article title typically appears at the top of the article, usually in a larger, boldfaced font. If you do not provide a title, the article will appear with the title Untitled on your blog. Titles can be a maximum of 254 characters long.

This is where you enter the actual text of your article. For all practical purposes, your article can contain any amount of text into this text area, as well as links, images, etc.

The Article Body text area is designed to act as a text editor; you can use its buttons and menus to format the text of the article body. The text-editor functions of this field will be covered in depth in the Rich Text Editor chapter.

You can specify files to be attached to your article by clicking the Attach File(s) link. When you click this link, a field appears so you can specify the full path to the file to be included with the article, or you can use the Browse button to search for it. If you want to attach more than one file, click the More button to create additional fields for specifying articles. To remove some or all of these additional fields (one at a time), click the Less button.

When readers visit your blog's main page, they will see the most recently posted articles. If your articles are long, your page may become too large to digest at a glance. In such cases, you can use an excerpt — a small sample of the article or a summary. When you use an excerpt for an article, the excerpt appears on the main page, followed by a more link. Clicking this link takes the reader to a page that shows the entire article. If your article is short, you can choose not to use an excerpt by clearing the Automatically generate excerpt checkbox and leaving the excerpt text area blank.

At the bottom of the Article Content section are two sets of controls that let you choose your publishing options. They are:

Use these radio buttons to choose whether to publish the entry immediately, or save it as a draft so you can work on it later.

The Preview button lets you review your entry before posting. The Save button either publishes your entry or saves it as a draft for later work (based on your choice from the two options above).